Michael and I met online a year or so ago, when he posted something about mental illness in a Facebook group for Caltech alumni. He, it turned out, also had bipolar disorder, and wrote about his experiences with mental illness on his website. (Technically, he had bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder, which is basically equivalent to having Type I bipolar disorder and schizophrenia at once. This sounds terrible, and is even worse.)

People who have a mental illness and are willing to talk openly about it are rare – even rarer, if they are still struggling with it, as Michael was. Aside from me and Michael, I only know one other person who is public about having bipolar disorder. (I hope he’s doing okay.)

Michael and I were in many ways kindred souls. We were both intelligent, articulate, creative people; we both graduated from Caltech; we both suffered from severe mental illness and were committed to raising awareness about mental health issues.

But there was one big difference between us. I had been able to find an effective medical treatment for my mental illness. He had not.

As a result, as his mental illness got worse, Michael hadn’t been able to keep his job as a software engineer. He worked as a contractor for awhile, but wasn’t able to keep that going, either. By the time I met him, he was living in housing provided by a nonprofit, eating from the food stamp program. When the food stamps ran out, he would sing for tips on the street – or, if no tips were forthcoming, simply go hungry.

Beyond the mental health problems, which were serious and getting worse, other medical problems were plaguing Michael – painful and potentially lethal ones. He spent a lot of time in the emergency room because it was the only place where – without money or health insurance – he could get treatment. Over the last few weeks, his health, mental and physical, continued to nosedive.

When he committed suicide, I think Michael was tired of fighting. I think he was tired of being in pain, saw no positive outcome, and decided to end the pain the only way possible.

The thing about a chemically driven mental illness is that when it’s with you, it’s with you. Every waking moment. The only ways to stop it are by dulling your brain with alcohol or other drugs, by fixing the problem medically, or by killing yourself. The people who survive are the ones who can suffer the pain long enough either to outlive that period of mental illness (some mental illnesses come and go periodically), or survive long enough to find a medical solution.

I spent six months struggling with continuous bipolar depression in 2003, before finally finding a medication regimen that worked. That took every ounce of my strength; I was within a day or two of killing myself when we finally found a medical solution. I vowed afterwards never to subject myself to that much pain again. I would not do that again, not even for another four decades of life. The pain was unbelievable.

So how Michael had the strength and courage to live with so much more untreatable pain for so long is beyond me. And to do so with compassion, grace, and a sense of humor – he must have been superhuman.

Michael was not a saint, and he had his own share of flaws, like every other human – but he made the world a brighter place, and he helped put a personal face on mental illness.

I cannot help but have spent the last half-week thinking how similar he and I were, and how easily his story could have been mine: “There, but for the grace of a teensy-tiny difference in brain chemistry, go I.”

And I wonder if, had my story been his, I could have handled it with half the grace and strength that he did.

ART IS OFTEN MADE IN ABANDONMENT, emerging unbidden in moments of selfless rapport with the materials and ideas we care about. In such moments we leave no space for others. That’s probably as it should be. Art, after all, rarely emerges from committees.

But while others’ reactions need not cause problems for the artist, they usually do. The problems arise when we confuse others’ priorities with our own. We carry real and imagined critics with us constantly — a veritable babble of voices, some remembered, some prophesied, and each eager to comment on all we do…

When the work goes well, we keep such inner distractions at bay, but in times of uncertainty or need, we begin listening. We abdicate artistic decision-making to others when we fear that the work itself will not bring us the understanding, acceptance and approval we seek.

…With commercial art this issue is often less troublesome since approval from the client is primary, and other rewards appropriately secondary. But for most art there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world. How could you not take criticism of that work personally?

– David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking.

I made a small change to my blog a few days ago. There’s a box in the top right where you can enter your email address to subscribe to the blog. Up until last week, it also displayed the number of blog subscribers. The number was at 623 when I decided to hide it.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been writing my blog for sixteen years. (I started in October 2003, when I left on my six-month trip through Southeast Asia.)

For almost all of those years, I honestly didn’t care how many people read my blog or whether they liked it or not. I mean, it was nice when they did, but I wasn’t writing it for them; I was writing it for me, because it was fun to write up my creative adventures and share them with the world.

It wasn’t until I started creating an online business that I started caring about things like subscriber count. Because suddenly, the number of people who wanted to read what I had to say mattered, because it could translate into dollars, and I needed those dollars to make a living. So over at Warp & Weave, I care a lot about subscribers, and I write things that are specifically designed to convince people to read my articles, subscribe to my mailing list, and hopefully one day buy my courses. That’s how an online business works. It’s commercial writing; it’s commercial art. Approval from the client, as the quote above points out, is the primary measure of success. And that’s totally appropriate, in that context.

The problem, as Art and Fear points out, comes when commercial priorities start creeping into what should be personal ones. The beginning of the quote, “Art is often made in abandonment, emerging unbidden in moments of selfless rapport with the materials and ideas we care about,” is something that resonates deeply with me and one that I have done damn little of over the last several years. I’ve been intently focused on commercial creativity – for completely appropriate reasons, since I have to eat! – but that focus has been devastating for my personal creative life, along two planes.

The obvious one is that I simply haven’t had much energy for anything that isn’t researching, writing course material, or teaching about color – unless, of course, it’s writing marketing materials, creating sales copy, learning about Facebook ads, search engine optimization, and other aspects of online marketing.

The more subtle one is that my thinking has shifted from writing and creating for the sheer joy of it, to writing/creating for the purpose of attracting an audience. And that, frankly, is no fun at all, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been writing much lately. I have so little free time and creative energy – why would I want to spend it on things that feel like more work??

So I basically quit writing my personal blog posts, because every time I sat down to write a blog post, I had this little critic sitting on my shoulder asking, over and over, “Are your subscribers going to like this? Are you going to lose readers by writing this?” And, of course, that subscriber count would tell me whether or not that particular blog post had gained me subscribers or not. Great for commercial writing. Terrible for something that’s supposed to be fun.

This blog isn’t, and shouldn’t be, about making money. This blog is about sharing my creative process and my creative life with others. And it should be fun, not work.

So I’ve hidden my subscriber count. And I hope to post more often. Smaller chunks of my life. Stuff about tomatoes, and cats, and the endless process of getting Grace ready for velvet-weaving. Stuff that’s fun, creative, and – most importantly – full of artistic abandonment, not worrying about who is or isn’t reading.

Like many other entrepreneurs, I belong to a “mastermind” – a small group of small-business-launchers who support each other. While I’ve never met any of the other three women in my mastermind in person (we live in three different countries!), we’ve become great friends and we chat a lot in our little Facebook group. We help each other solve our problems, hold each other accountable for our commitments, and laugh a lot along the way.

One of them asked if we’d done a vision board recently – a deep dive, looking out 10-20 years. What do you want your life to look like? Where do you want to live? How much time until you want to stop working? What income model will get you there? And then think how to match the income model with a business that will get you there.

(Can you tell that what she teaches is financial planning?)

I have to admit that I was a bit taken aback. Mostly because I hadn’t thought anywhere near that far in advance when I got started down this teaching path.

I thought about it for awhile, then wrote:

The vision board is a really interesting and really good idea! I didn’t think that far ahead at all – I just thought, “What could I do that might make enough to pay the bills, that doesn’t involve working in high tech or some other job I would hate?” and teaching weaving online was the only thing that came up.

However, I’m happy with my choice, because frankly I love teaching this stuff – so much that I don’t really see retiring, because I’d do this for free! (Maybe not as much, but yes, I would teach for the fun of it. I love connecting to students, and seeing understanding light up in their eyes!)

But yes, I should do a visioning board…

Speaking of teaching, I’m now six weeks into teaching my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course. This is the twelve-week, instructor-led online workshop course I was selling in December. It’s been a grueling pace for me – I started with a solid course outline, but have made some major revisions, and added a LOT more material, in the process of teaching the course.

I’ve been delighted with my students – they’ve been thirstily soaking up everything I’ve been showing them. And so far, they seem to be delighted with the course. Many of them have said that this was exactly the course they had been searching for but not been able to find, and that they feel they finally “get” color now!

Which is, of course, exactly why I created the course, and why I love teaching!

I have six more weeks of the course to go, but more importantly I have two more modules of the course to create. Each module is 3-7 lessons plus 3-4 student exercises – so between creating the lessons and returning feedback on the exercises, I’ve had very little time to do anything else! That’s one of the reasons there have been very few blog posts lately.

But in another four weeks, I will be done writing lessons…and then watch out world! I am dreaming of velvets again….

So about those visioning boards: I probably should do one, but I’m not sure I need to. This is my vision of the perfect life.

My trainer had me test my 1-rep max for squats the first time today – the maximum weight I could lift, just once, for that exercise.

Unfortunately we didn’t get quite all the way to my max – when we finished, I still felt like I could have done more weight. But we smashed through the 1000-weasel mark like it never existed. I squatted 1,060 weasels and felt like I could have done at least another 40-80 weasels!

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout…) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(For those of you not familiar with the weasel unit of measurement, there are 4 standard English weasels to the pound, so I was squatting 265 pounds and felt like I could have done 10-20 pounds more at least. And if you’re wondering why I’m measuring progress in weasels, check out this blog post about why weasels are way better than self-discipline!)

And I wasn’t even at my true maximum. And I’m 48. And I’ve been training for exactly 6.5 months as of today. Before that, I was a couch potato.

Dang. I got into this to lower my blood sugar, but you know, I think I might actually be a contender?

That said, I have a long way to go before I start winning powerlifting competitions. Powerlifting consists of three lifts: squat, deadlift, and bench press. My deadlift and bench press are quite weak, so I need to work on those areas before I’m ready to enter competitions (if I decide to do that).

The first launch of my online courses is over. And it went really well.

Here’s a copy of the email I sent out to my Warp & Weave subscriber list yesterday morning. It pretty much says it all.

Dear ____,

Absolutely no sales stuff today. Instead, I want to say a huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to you and the rest of the weaving community.

When I quit my job at Google three years ago to pursue my dream of making a living as a weaver and a weaving teacher, I wasn’t sure I could do it. As we all know, it’s really, really hard to make a living in the fiber arts. I didn’t want to live my life on a plane, so I decided to focus on teaching online. It was a leap of faith.

I wasn’t sure I could do it. Neither was anyone else.

Some friends were supportive. Others, less so. One weaving “friend,” when I told her my plans, said, “Good luck. I hope you like being poor.”

The last few years have had ups and downs, but I kept going because so many people told me my blog posts about color in weaving were useful and enlightening. Both of my parents are scientific researchers. I believe that one of the greatest gifts one person can give another is the gift of understanding, and one of the highest callings a person can have is figuring out how things work and then teaching that to others. Knowing my posts were teaching and helping others gave me the courage to keep going.

The response to my course launch has been phenomenal, and has given me confidence that my “friend” was wrong, and that I can – in time – make a full living as a weaving teacher.

When I was an undergraduate at Caltech, renowned science fiction writer David Brin came to speak at SPECTRE, our science fiction book club. At the end of his talk, he told us about a nightmare he’d had.

“I was at work in the astrophysics department, as usual, and my boss came up behind me. He said, ‘We’ve figured it out! You’d do this for free! In fact, you’d pay US to do this!’”

“I woke up in a cold sweat,” said Brin. “And now, I lay the David Brin Curse on all of you….that someday, you too will wake up from the same nightmare.”